Posted on 06/17/2019 2:56:34 PM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
More than 70 conservative mayors and councillors pledged support for President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday in the latest sign that France’s centre-Right opposition party, The Republicans, is in danger of extinction.
Some 31 per cent of party supporters favour an alliance with Mr Macron’s LREM party, while 26 per cent would back an alliance with Marine Le Pen’s far-Right National Rally, according to a poll published in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
Senior conservatives fear that Mr Macron is taking over the centre-Right while hard nationalists swing behind the National Rally following The Republicans’ drubbing in the European elections.
The party took just eight per cent of the vote — an even more humiliating defeat than that suffered by the UK Conservative Party.
Ms Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, is urging mainstream conservatives to join an alliance with the National Rally.
In the latest sign that rank-and-file Republicans are defecting to Mr Macron, 72 Right-wing and centre-Right mayors and councillors from across France announced their support for the centrist president in a joint letter published in the Journal du Dimanche.
“We are among those who desire the all-important success of France, which is why we want the president of the [French] Republic and the government to succeed, as nothing will be built on their failure,” the letter said.
Noting that many French people “feel abandoned, alienated, left behind,” the letter added: “We refuse to let ourselves be reduced to a label, a voting instruction, a party apparatus. Our party is firstly our constituents, it is the Republic.”
The Republicans are desperately seeking a new leader. Laurent Wauquiez, the party’s former chief, resigned a week after the European elections.
Mr Macron has taken advantage of the party’s existential crisis to renew his charm offensive to gain conservative support.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
European politics does not matter... it is never the will of the people... until the guillotines come out.
I don’t understand Euro politics. Conservatives in France are called Republicans but none of the Party’s are Conservative in the sense we think of Conservative.
Regardless of names, it’s exactly parallel to the US: they are scared shiteless of Ms.Le Pen, just as the GOP wing of the Uniparty was/is scared of Trump.
La Schmucks!
Europe’s Populists Are Here to Stay
New parties are finding success by addressing the concerns of voters who feel neglected and disdained by liberal elites....
But the roots of the populist revolt are widely misunderstood. These parties are routinely portrayed as little more than a refuge for bigots, Rust Belt rejects, victims of the Great Recession and angry old white men. Some discern in them the return of fascism, pointing to the dark history of several of the national populist parties and their willingness to overlook the hateful views of their most extreme supporters. Others see them as an ephemeral expression of protest politics.
Such narratives may be comforting to some, but they are misleading. The picture is far more complex. National populism isn’t going away anytime soon, because it is anchored in deeper currents that have been swirling beneath Western democracies over many decades and still have a long way to run. It is a movement that is just getting started....
In Britain, more than 40% of 18-24-year-olds, and 58% of the slightly older 25-49-year-olds, recently said that immigration is “too high.” This helps to explain why Brexit was endorsed not simply by old white men but by one in two women, one in two 35-44-year-olds, and one in three black and ethnic minority voters....
Populists are unlikely to stage a complete takeover, but they will become a permanent and more disruptive fixture on the landscape. Europe is aging, North Africa is unstable, migration will remain high, Islamist terror looks unlikely to fade and there may yet be another financial crisis. In facing these problems, many of the established parties simply look lost.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europes-populists-are-here-to-stay-11560524237
sounds like they cover the entire political spectrum from Leninism to Stalinism.
Charm offensive? More like globalist money offensive.
I never associated that PC Magazine guy with the cheese eaters until now.
The Bill Kristol wing?
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